Self Impression explores the fascinating ways in which writers from the 1870s to the 1930s - including Pater, Ruskin, Proust, Joyce, Stein, Pound, and Woolf - experimented with forms of life-writing. It proposes a new relation between autobiography and fiction in the period and a radically innovative literary history of Modernism.
wide-ranging and consequential new account of British literature from 1870 to 1930 ... In modernism, as Saunders demonstrates in impressive detail, we may find an astonishing variety of experimental interactions between biography, autobiography, fiction, and criticism ... With this vast body of evidence, quoted generously and treated expertly, Saunders makes a compelling case for reading modernism as a discourse of im/personality. [One of] two exceedingly good books - stimulating in their arguments, rich in attention to literary and scholarly detail, and engagingly written.